Canadian feminist activist receives death threats and other abuse after being targeted by Men’s Rights Activists

Earlier this month, as many of you no doubt know, a Men’s Rights group sponsored a lecture at the University of Toronto. The event drew protesters, and the protesters drew MRAs with video cameras. One of the MRAs filmed a confrontation between a red-haired feminist activist and a number of MRAs who continually interrupted her as she tried to read a brief statement.

Her crime? She wasn’t exactly polite in responding to the interrupters. And so, after video of the confrontation was uploaded to YouTube, and linked to on the Men’s Rights subreddit and elsewhere, she became a virtual punching bag for the angry misogynists of the internet.

A Voice for Men, naturally, led the charge, running an article by Canadian MRA Dan Perrins labeling her “Little red frothing fornication mouth” and commenting on her breasts. The Amazing Atheist weighed in with a video I couldn’t bring myself to even watch.

Since being targeted by angry YouTube misogynists and MRAs, the red-haired activist has received death threats, rape threats and literally hundreds of other hateful and harassing messages. She’s also been “doxxed” — that is, she’s had her personal information plastered all over the internet, including on A Voice for Men’s forum. Ten days after being uploaded to YouTube, the video of her faceoff against the MRAs has garnered more than 300,000 views, and YouTubers are still leaving threats and insults and crude sexual comments.

Several days ago, she contacted me to tell me about the harassment she’s endured. Here’s some of what she wrote:

I’m the red-head. I’m sure by now, you’re one of the 260,000 people who have seen the video of me … .

Because I had the audacity to tell a dude to stfu, an MRA no less, I have since been the target of not only just online misogyny (as if that’s a surprise) but cyber stalking, rape and death threats. They somehow found my facebook, they found my tumblr, they found a twitter acct that I don’t even use, they even found an old [dating site] profile of mine with outdated info …

I also got an anonymous message on tumblr that specifically said “[name deleted] would be disappointed”. [Name deleted] is my dog that died 1.5 years ago, I don’t talk about him on tumblr, nor fb, so they would have had to reaaaaalllly dig to find this info. …

In about 12-24hours, I got about400-500 new messages on my blog, most of them hate, which included rape and death threats, also people wishing death upon me or the typical troll “kill yourself” message. They made a meme of me.

I dunno how many haters I have, and I don’t know where they are. I can’t be sure at any given second, if I’m ever outside my house … if anyone is going to recognize me and try to hurt me.

With her permission, I am reposting screenshots she sent me documenting some of the harassment she’s endured. Even though her personal information has already been widely disseminated online, I don’t want to contribute to that, so I’ve whited out any information that might reveal her identity.

TRIGGER WARNING for what follows, for threatening language and crude sexual remarks.

Here’s a death threat she received from someone claiming to represent the “Islamic Brotherhood.”

Here are some sample comments from her Tumblr inbox. I’ve whited out comments and parts of comments that consist of her contact info, which being sent to her in an attempt to intimidate and frighten her by letting her know they “know where she lives.”

Here’s another threatening comment sent to her via Tumblr:

Here are some comments sent to her via her YouTube account. You’ll notice that the second comment comes from AVFM’s Dan Perrins, who is clearly relishing the attacks on her.

And another glimpse into her YouTube inbox:

Here’s a screenshot from a Men’s Rights forum revealing her personal information.

Meanwhile, over on YouTube, the hateful comments continue to pile up. Here are some of the nastiest ones I’ve collected. I am deliberately posting a lot of them in an attempt to convey something of the relentless nature of the attacks on teh red-haired activist — though I should note I’ve only gone through a small portion of the total comments there and this doesn’t even reflect all of the awful ones I found. These are not in any particular order. I threw in a few non-threatening ones that struck me as a tad ironic or otherwise revealing.

Again, this is only a small fraction of the abuse she’s gotten on YouTube.

This is what happens when MRAs and other misogynists target a woman online. The only thing that’s surprising here is the sheer amount of the hateful comments.

I’ve seen no serious attempts from any MRAs to rein in this sort of hatred. A Voice for Men has tried to distance itself in a superficial way from some of the harassment it has played a central role in unleashing, with an official announcement asking readers to refrain from posting the personal information of the red-haired activist in the comments. Meanwhile, in the AVFM forum, comments linking to her defunct dating profiles remain up.

This is what MRA “activism” looks like.

Coming tomorrow: A more detailed look at AVFM’s role in the harassment.

Comments

It’s a rather interesting set of problems with rationality and logic and it has parallels in several areas where zero-sum-gamers try to suppress other people. I think it is involved in that intersection among racists, misogynists and LGBTQ phobes.

1) See people talking about women/LGBTQ/race problems.
2) Shout about problems that a perceived “opposite group” experiences.

*There is no “cancelling out”, the problems still remain. As a tactic it’s a simple attempt at drowning out a signal with another. A tactic that only works in social conflict terms and does nothing with argument at all.

*This behavior reflects WEAKNESS among the people acting this way. What sort of human is happy to progress because of prejudice and discrimination in the groups they are part of? When your response to seeing a group of people working on their problems is to suppress it you can bet that they are not doing that to people working on their issues, that’s literal irrational discrimination. Winning instead of being correct? I’ll avoid those personal flaws.

*These behaviors reflect irrational group-think even in a purely social conflict sense. Do they really think the others acting like them are going to abandon that behavior once it comes to problems that individuals have within that group come up? They will just as quickly start shouting one another down. Mere race, sex, or gender is not a measure of the quality of another when it comes to being a social ally beyond a temporary numbers game.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.